Sorry not sorry

Dominic Cummings refusing to apologise

Do people apologise less than they used to? 

Recently, the King of Belgium expressed "deepest regrets" for his country's colonial abuses. And his brother, Prince Laurent, said that he "always apologises" to African heads of state when they meet.  

This is good and meaningful. The more so, I feel, because saying sorry is rather going out of fashion. No matter how many unfulfilled promises and u-turns are made by governments, they never apologise. Formerly, wouldn't there have been more embarrassment about errors? Now they just ignore them and hope they will go away - which, unfortunately, is what seems to happen. 

As the UK started to emerge from lockdown in July, Boris Johnson was accused of "cowardly" language when saying that care homes "didn't really follow the procedures" and shifting blame onto the sector. The next day, no-one was apologising. Instead they claimed he meant something different, which journalists at the briefing found hard to swallow. And when challenged further, the spokesperson just refused to answer the question and kept on repeating the agreed explanation. Or lie. 

I suppose that's because there is no longer any pretence at there being a single official record of anything. And indeed Johnson's team was accused of rewriting history by repeatedly claiming he had said something he hadn't. 

President Trump is currently reckoned to tell 23 lies every day  (up from 12 last year), but that doesn't seem to matter because enough people are happy with one of the myriad alternative versions of reality that they can inhabit, populated by "alternative facts". Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear just sometimes a nod in the direction of regret? 

I'm grateful to my MP for replying to my complaint about Dominic Cummings' notorious trip to Durham. He was inclined to give Cummings the benefit of the doubt, but he thought he should nonetheless have apologised. Quite! Yes indeed he should. But that would, I suppose, not be his way, which is to be uncompromising. For those of us who expect and like compromise, his obstinacy afterwards was even worse than the infringement itself. 

Actually, King Philippe's "regrets" were noted to fall short of a proper apology, and that's no doubt because there's an immediate implication that reparations would be made. At a personal level as well, of course, an apology starts to look a bit thin if you're not prepared to back it up with action. 

And there's a technique to being sorry in Western culture, thanks to centuries of intellectualising in Christianity, which has apology and forgiveness at its heart. It provides four useful steps: being genuinely sorry and wanting to do better (contrition), fully expressing that regret (confession), being released (absolution) and making up for it (satisfaction or penance). 

Now it seems to me that these really are useful, because they make you properly consider whether you really are sorry for something, and how you're going to repair the relationship with whoever you may have injured. 

I know it's a typical British habit to apologise first and establish any blame afterwards. It's just polite - although it's often passive-aggressive ("I'm saying sorry but really it's your fault so you'd better say sorry, too"). A recent poll found that British people apologise eight times a day. 

But the older I get (and, no doubt, the stuffier) the more often I find a bit of a dislocation here. I'm not saying that people are meaner or less polite. That British apology reflex is still there, but not so much in work situations. It seems a deliberate behaviour change. 

There's a positive side to this. Maybe we shouldn't go round being sorry all the time. For example, studies have shown that women are more inclined than men to apologise and to expect apologies, but that this can be to their disadvantage because it signifies not just politeness but deference. And in a professional environment that can be tactically sensible or not, depending on the situation. 

This article puts it nicely, with a reference to a study in the journal of applied social psychology. The article concludes that apologies make most impact when they're unexpected, and the most unexpected and therefore most effective apology would be from a senior to a junior, and from a male to a female within a workplace. How concisely does that capture our whole history of the male-dominated workplace! No wonder young women might be encouraged to resist unnecessary apologies, even never to apologise. 

But I'm not 100% convinced by the idea in this Ted Talk that we can generally say "thank you" instead. 

In the end, I suppose I just have a lower 'apology threshold'. I do think that expressing regret for things is a good and necessary thing for us to do. It's not just for the benefit of the recipient. It might not be intended for their benefit at all. Understanding responsibility for an error and wishing to do better next time is something we teach our children as soon as they learn they find themselves making deliberate choices. 

I dare say anthropologists can explain that all societies involve a measure of expected apology as part of the social glue of justice. It’s about confirming, re-establishing a common set of values, and in these times we need that more than ever.